Forum crosspost: Forget Intel, what new hardware is coming?

I thought that this topic was good enough to explore on the Journal. With all …

Speculation about the Intel transition running rampant across the web. Everyone's gottheirownopinion about what this means for Apple and it's userbase. Most people have forgotten that, in the Keynote, Steve promised us a bunch of of PPC updates coming in the next year or two. So what do you see happening to the spread of offering from Apple?

There are a few differing camps, some people are convinced that we'll see nothing but incremental bumps to the existing line of machines until the "Intel epoch" at which time everything PPC will cease to exist and Intel will reign supreme.

I take a differing view. I think that Apple will continue to release the same machines (or one or two new models) and Intel internals will be a BTO for a while. I think the transition will be very gradual and that at some point Intel will become standard and PPC will become BTO with PPC being dropped completely in two to three years. What I'm not sure of is how Apple will transition within the product line. Will Apple follow Jon Stokes' plan of portables and Mac minis first, ending with Xserves at some later date? Or will Apple transition the entire line at once?

I think we're all hoping that Apple will continue to innovate in the next two years (I don't see any reason why the underlying architecture would change that, they've known about the upcoming change for a few years now and we got the Mac Mini, right?), but what's everyone else's take on it?